Al Gore, Super-Rich Sellout
The liberal media have spent 12 years feeling sorry for Al Gore.The Man
Who Should Have Won in 2000 has had megatons of positive publicity
dumped on him, hailing him as the “Goracle.” They cheered as leftists
honored him with the Nobel Peace Prize and gave an Oscar to his filmed
eco-sermon “An Inconvenient Truth.”
So when Gore sold his left-wing cable channel Current TV to al-Jazeera
for $500 million, where were they? Despite the fact that conservatives
thought the deal sounded like a ridiculous April Fools joke, the
networks had nearly nothing to say. ABC skipped it entirely. CBS and NBC
offered a perfunctory sentence on a couple of newscasts.
These networks might argue this was not an Earth-shattering business
event given the puny size of Current’s audience, which is true. At about
42,000 viewers in prime time, the nationwide audience could fit inside
the Washington Redskins’ Fedex Field, and still leave the stadium
half-empty. It’s about one-fiftieth of the audience TLC gets with “Honey
Boo Boo.” Of about 96 cable channels that are publicly rated by
Nielsen, 93 of them have higher ratings than Current. It is a Nothing
Network.
But the controversy is not about ratings. It’s about one network
selling itself to another best known for vicious anti-American
propaganda. Al-Jazeera is not buying Current for the potential profits.
Surely, they’ll shut the old channel down. They want the cable slots to
push their poison in American homes.
In 2006, CNN’s Frank Sesno interviewed al-Jazeera talk show host Riz
Khan and asked if the terrorist group Hamas should be designated as a
terrorist organization. “I’m not one to judge,” Khan replied. What about
Hezbollah? Khan answered: “Same thing, you know, I'm not going to
judge.”
There are other signs of disturbing pro-Islamist bias. In the midst of
the “Arab Spring” celebrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on February 11,
2011, some 200 men sexually assaulted CBS correspondent Lara Logan.
Al-Jazeera English, which was credited by Hillary Clinton and other
liberals for its ubiquitous coverage of the uprising, deliberately
ignored the assault on Logan. When they were called out by Washington
Post columnist Jonathan Capehart, al-Jazeera English publicist responded
that the network “believes as a general rule” that journalists “are not
the story.” Capehart then noted that just days before, al-Jazeera
touted a story on how “Domestic and foreign journalists have come under
siege amid the turmoil in Egypt.” 
Then there’s the case of honoring Lebanese terrorist Samir Kuntar. In
1979, Kuntar was imprisoned for shooting an Israeli civilian in front of
the Israeli’s four-year-old daughter and then bashing in the little
girl’s head with his rifle. In 2008, al-Jazeera in Qatar threw a
televised birthday party for Kuntar, then newly released in a prisoner
exchange. An al-Jazeera interviewer told Kuntar, “You deserve even more
than this,” then brought out cake and sparklers. The cake had pictures
on it, and Kuntar declared the “most beautiful picture” on the cake was
of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah. “There cannot be anything
more beautiful,” he proclaimed.
Al Gore could see nothing but positive qualities in his buyer, putting
out a shameless statement that claimed, “al-Jazeera, like Current,
believes that facts and truth lead to a better understanding of the
world around us.”
Gore rebuffed an offer from conservative radio/TV personality Glenn
Beck to buy Current TV. Beck was told, “The legacy of who the network
goes to is important to us and we are sensitive to networks not aligned
with our point of view.”
Beck is not aligned with the Gore viewpoint, and yet al-Jazeera is? Al
Gore, too, would celebrate a child-murdering terrorist with a birthday
cake? Why isn’t this alignment controversial or newsworthy?
Then the story gets worse. While Beck told his listeners he was
rejected within minutes, Gore became a lobbyist for al-Jazeera. New York
Times media reporter Brian Stelter revealed that to preserve the deal
and his big payout, Gore went to some of cable distributors looking for
an excuse to drop the low-rated channel, “and reminded them that their
contracts with Current TV called it a news channel. Were the
distributors going to say that an American version of Al Jazeera didn't
qualify, possibly invoking ugly stereotypes of the Middle Eastern news
giant?”
So dropping al-Jazeera became anti-“news,” anti-Arab, and Islamophobic.
But the networks won’t breathe a word about Beck, and never allowed a
conservative or a critic of radical Islam to offer any criticism of
either Al Gore the super-rich sellout, or his terror-enabling buyer.
None dares express horror that the man who was almost president on 9/11
was allying himself with al-Qaeda’s video jukebox.
